Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Pune-based Sci/Math Learning Platform @FunctionSpace get funding from @NexusVP

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(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

Pune-based Function Space, an online “social” platform for learning science and maths has recently raised seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners.

Function Space is trying to make STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education fun and engaging, something that is seriously been missing from our education system

Function Space, already offers a strong community consisting of users from over 190 countries, including students, professors and researchers from MIT, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, Indian Institute of Technology campuses, Indian Institute of Science and other prestigious institutions.

The funding will be used for expansion: of their content, their tools, and their customer reach.

Function Space was founded in 2013 by Adit Gupta, Sakshi Majmudar and Sumit Maniyar.

Note, this makes NexusVP the most Pune-friendly venture capital firm with 9 investments in Pune.

Read the full article

MasterCard acquires Pune-based Electra Card Services

Money Matters,

Credit Card company Mastercard has acquires Pune-based Electra Card Services, (owned by Pune’s Opus Software Solutions), reports the Times of India.

Excerpt:

ECS […] provides software products and processing services for electronic payments. Its customer base includes financial institutions, retailers and telcos in over 25 countries. ECS’ suite of products enables customers to issue and manage all types of payment cards and electronically process card transactions across multiple channels such as ATM, point of sales, internet and mobile.

More information:

Pune based @Clogeny Technologies acquired by US based MSys Technologies

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(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

According to a press release:

MSys Technologies, a Georgia, US-based company that provides technology and product engineering services in storage, cloud computing, embedded systems, telecommunications, quality assurance, test automation, and technical support, has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Clogeny Technologies, based in Pune, specializing in storage, big data, cloud computing, and DevOps

Here are further relevant excerpts from the press release:

About MSys Technologies

MSys was founded in 2007 in Chennai, India by CEO, Sanjay Sehgal. After gradually progressing through technology projects for several clients, mostly from the United States, the company established two additional locations: one in Johns Creek, Georgia and the second one in Bangalore, India.

MSys has close to 300 employees with exceptional technical expertise in all the industry verticals they serve. With several directors of engineering, senior managers, and technology managers, the company has a proven delivery team most suited for undertaking high-level technical projects. Since its inception in 2007, MSys has shown remarkable financial growth. MSys has had several clients from both the United States and Europe. The decision to acquire Clogeny came up as part of an expansion plan for MSys through which it could serve a larger client base with varied requirements.

About Clogeny Technologies

Clogeny Technologies was established in 2009 as a private company headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was established by CEO, Kalpak Shah, and CTO, Chirag Jog. Clogeny is an outsourced product development and software services company with expertise in DevOps, storage, cloud computing and Big Data. Since its inception, Clogeny has served 35+ customers and has created a differentiated set of offerings in cloud, storage, and DevOps domains.

See full press release.

Rdio acquires Pune’s Dhingana to Enter India Market

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MediaNama is reporting that international streaming music startup Rdio has acquired Dhingana in a bid to enter the India market.

This is really less of an “acquisition” and more of a “fire sale” (or an aquihire):

Sources also told MediaNama that the amount being offered to Dhingana is lower than the amount of funding they had raised. Dhingana had shut down its operations in February 2014 a couple of months after the biggest music label in India, T-Series, decided not to renew its contract with the company. In December, after reports that Dhingana might shut down, [CEO] Bhatia had told MediaNama that the company was in the process of restructuring its operations. He had at that point had declined to comment on the possibility of a shut-down.

Dhingana was backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, but had also raised funding from Helion Ventures and Inventus Capital prior to this.

The founder of Dhingana will join Rdio team:

founders Snehal Shinde and Swapnil Shinde will be joining the Rdio team, where they will be responsible for Rdio’s expansion efforts in India as well as other emerging markets. Rdio India will be launching later this year.

Rdio provides ad-supported and ad-free online music streaming services in 35 countries:

Created by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis in 2010, it last raised funding in 2011, when it then received $17.5 million from Mangrove Capital Partners, along with earlier investors Skype, Atomico Ventures and Friis himself through some of his investment entities.

One interesting aspect of this acquisition for PuneTech readers is the technology aspect of it. There will, hopefully, soon be APIs for us:

Open for developers in India? Rdio has an API that can be used by developers to create music oriented apps. Internationally Shazam uses these APIs, but the company has a tie-up with Saavn in India for music recognition services. It’s not clear what will happen to that deal once the acquisition is completed. Gaana had also launched a similar API last month and had invited developers to submit app ideas on its website.

Read the full article

Quick Heal plans initial public offer in Dec-Jan – Financial Express

Money Matters, News,

Financial Express reports that Pune-based computer security software products company Quick Heal is planning an IPO in Dec-Jan.

This is likely to be Pune’s first software product company IPO, unless Pubmatic manages to do an IPO before that (which is still quite possible).

Excerpts from the article:

In 2010, the Pune-based company was valued at Rs 600 crore, when Sequoia invested Rs 60 crore for a 10 per cent stake.

Sales have grown from Rs 10 crore a decade ago, to over Rs 215 crore in FY 13 and expects to cross Rs 250 crore mark in FY 14, Katkar said.

“Over a span of 20 years the company’s R&D has focused on computer and network security solutions. We now plan to expand new products range with the launch of new version of end point security (EPS) in July-August this year. We are also offering data loss prevention and mobile devise management to our customers,” Katkar said.

The company has more than 8 million customers in 60 countries. The company has strong global presence with offices in Dubai, Japan, USA and Kenya. It plans to strengthen the staff strength in these offices and looking at opening new office in Europe and Australia in the near future, he added.

QuickHeal, which claims a 35 per cent market share in India’s consumer anti-virus market, was founded by Pune-based brothers Kailash Katkar and Sanjay Katkar.

Read the full article

Interview with @NexusVP, the most active tech Venture Capitalists in Pune

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Venture Capital firm Nexus VP, with 8 investments in Pune, is not only the VC firm with the largest presence in Pune, but conversely, they also seem to love Pune, with more investments here than any other city, including everyone else’s darling Bangalore.

Recently, Sandeep Singhal wrote this in a tweet:

Pune has the most product oriented culture. With 8 investments plan to spend more time there.

and soon after that, Nexus held an event in Pune showcasing 3 of their portfolio companies. With this much invested in Pune, and more activities planned, we decided to talk to Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus to find out more about their Pune love affair.

How many companies have you invested in Pune? Can you name them?

Currently 8 of our companies have offices in Pune : Pubmatic, Druva, Sedemac, Helpshift, Uniken, and 3 others that will be announced in time

What attracts you to Pune? What would you say about the Pune start-up ecosystem, in comparison with other cities?

We consider Pune as a key technology hub in India. We find very high quality start-ups in Pune. They are either starting up in Pune or are setting up engineering offices here very early on in their life cycle to tap onto the superlative engineering talent in the city.

What are you plans for 2014-15?

We plan to continue / increase our focus in Pune, hope to interact and partner with many more exceptional entrepreneurs in Pune in coming years.

What technologies do you see as most exciting for the next few years?

We expect that exciting startup opportunities will be unearthed at the intersection of different technology trends like mobility, cloud and big data, applied to all facets of life spanning but not limited to health and wellness, education, enterprise IT, retail, home automation, industrial automation, agriculture, etc. That said, rather than being thesis driven, we are fundementally bottoms up investors looking to partner with passionate entrepreneurs who create category defining companies.

What would your top-3 recommendations (advice) be for an entrepreneur?

  • Instill the sales DNA in yourself. No matter what your background might be, as an entrepreneur you would always need to sell : to your customers, to your prospective hires and employees, to your investors.
  • Always look to hire better than yourselves.
  • Less is more. It’s much more important to figure out what features your product should Not have than what features it should have. Start-up that thrives does One thing right and better than anyone else, that addresses one key pain-point felt by a big enough target set of users / customers.

According to you, what is the #1 mistake that most first-time tech startup founders make?

Point #3 above. Tech start up founders have the propensity to start building out the technology / product, without really understanding that key One thing that is needed in their target market, that they have a competitive advantage one. Achieving product – market fit is quite different than developing the technology. Key is focus and saying ‘no’ to features much more than saying ‘yes’.

GSF is looking for an EIR: Good opportunity for some Pune Techie

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@thinkSantosh (Santosh Dawara) points out that the GSF (Global Superangels Forum) is looking for an Entrepreneur in Residence, and hopes people from Pune will take this opportunity to increase their network, increase their exposure, and help improve Pune’s presence in the Indian and Global startup ecosystem.

More information about the EIR@GSF program is here.

What are they looking for?

An EiR (Entrepreneur in Residence) is a misfit, a rebel and a leader, who sees an opportunity for change everywhere he/she looks. An EiR is restless, looking for his/her next challenge, while engaging with the best and brightest startups in India. An EiR is a humble, go-­getter, rolling his/her sleeves up to get the job, any job, done.

EiRs will anchor GSF’s startup accelerator programs in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai by scouting, evaluating and aiding selection of the best startups from different regions of India. They will explore and drive strategic partnerships and expand GSF’s already robust mentor network of top entrepreneurs and executives in the tech community across the four cities. EiRs will also be responsible for designing and executing programming, managing logistics and buddy mentoring startups from MVP to Demo Day to eventual funding. EiRs are also awarded equity into the startups selected for GSF Accelerator.

See additional details in this YourStory article on GSF EiRs!

What qualifications are required?

For its inaugural program, GSF Accelerator inducted 17 EiRs who have have been entrepreneurs, students, investors, and ex-consultants. They have worked at some of the most exciting companies in the world and have educated from top tier educational institutions. Till date 30 EiRs have been part of GSF Acceleration program. For more details, please see the profiles of the GSF 2013 EiR
Team, and the GSF 2012 EiR Team.

Why is this being shared here?

Santosh says this:

I have no direct affiliation to GSF. But here’s why I suggested this,

In the near term an EIR is not a bad thing for an entrepreneur who is in-between ideas and is looking for a filler, or to simply grow his or her outlook, network.

In the long run, it will help us all immensely if any serious incubator were to consider a presence in Pune. If I may remind everyone, we are still missing the institutionalization of failures and successes of Punes startups. It helps to have one roof. As a result, every yr startups get going and attempt to reinvent without the benefit of what’s already been figured out by previous startups.

An incubator in Pune is atleast a step in that direction. If not that, having direct connections is the next best thing.

Can someone help me with the application?

Again, Santosh writes:

If the applicant is serious and has some of the necessary qualifications, I think there’s a lot of people on this list who will be willing to help in whatever way they can.

Pune’s Pubmatic gets $13MM funding; preparing for a $1B IPO?

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Pubmatic, a software product company with solutions in the cloud and mobile advertising space, which is fully developed out of Pune, has just received $13 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, along with existing investors. This takes the total amount of funding raised by Pubmatic to $76 million.

Excerpt:

The company plans to use the investment raised to improve its platform and for International expansion. PubMatic CEO and co-founder Rajeev Goel is also quoted in the press release as saying this investment will improve its ”direct market access by plugging into the global NGP (Nokia Growth Partners) and Nokia presence.”

The more interesting, and speculative, report comes from the Wall Street Journal article, which claims that Pubmatic is getting ready for an IPO, and are hoping for a valuation in excess of $1 billion.

We have been hoping for a Pubmatic IPO for a couple of years now ever since they hired a CFO who specializes in IPOs. However, it appears to be taking a little longer than expected.

Let’s hope that Pubmatic soon becomes Pune’s first software product IPO.

References:
– Medianama
– Wall Street Journal

@PersistentSys acquires @CloudSquads – Pune/California based enterprise social media startup

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Pune’s Persistent Systems has just acquired CloudSquads, a Pune and San Francisco based startup that builds social apps for the enterprise market.

After cloud-computing and mobile, the new hottest trend in the industry is SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), and CloudSquads is smack in the middle of this trend. CloudSquads builds products that help companies like E*Trade, GE, Autodesk to use social media for customer support, sales, marketing. In addition they build apps that can be used for providing private social networking features within the enterprise.

From the press release:

CloudSquads helps companies develop a strategy for engaging with the modern social customer across all customer facing functions including brand, marketing, sales and support. The company implements platforms which provide rich capabilities that transform these interactions into healthy communities and then integrates those platforms with companies’ internal systems allowing them to better know and serve their customers.

and also:

“Social communities are the natural next step in the evolution and enhancement of external systems of engagement with customers, following the 1-800 number and corporate web presence,” said Ashish Seth, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “CloudSquads helps global brands unlock the power of social to realize dramatic increases in employee productivity, double digit improvements in marketing and sales effectiveness and dramatically lower support costs, said Henry Bruckstein, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “Combining the global reach and broad technology capabilities of Persistent Systems will allow us to multiply the transformative impact in the market.”

Why is Persistent buying CloudSquads? According to Ranga Puranik, President of Persistent:

“CloudSquads complements our software product development and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technology expertise with consulting, IP connectors and implementation services around social community platforms and is perfectly aligned to better serve our ISV and enterprise customer base.”

Persistent had recently reported that it had created “Persistent Venture Fund”, a venture fund to invest in early stage startups, mainly in the SMAC domain. Persistent Venture Fund’s first investment was in US-based ustyme, a free video call app for the iPad.

According to Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, the fund will only invest in startups that are strategically interesting to Persistent’s business.

“We consider two aspects for selection. First is the technology area of the start-up and its similarity to our interests, and second the customers that it needs to align with our customer eco-system,” he added.

Pune based enterprise security firm Uniken raises investment from Nexus Venture Partners

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Pune-based enterprise security software company, Uniken, has just raised a round of funding from Nexus Venture Partners, reports the Economic Times. The amount of funding has not been disclosed, but the internet is claiming that it is around $4.8 million. This is Nexus’ second major investment

Uniken’s main product is the REL-ID platform which allows enterprise software to be accessed from remote clients (i.e. mobiles, laptops, or home computers of customers or employees) in a secure way, in spite of the fact that the client is connecting to the server via an untrusted internet connection.

Imagine a bank, which is able to give its customers a “secure” mobile app that connects to the bank servers over the internet, but then uses REL-ID’s “private communication circuts” to establish a secure connection between the app and the server. Similarly, imagine an the sales database of a company being accessed by one of the salespersons on the road using a laptop. REL-ID PCC can be used to secure the connection between the laptop and the enterprise app without requiring laptop to be on the company network, and without requiring a VPN.

So, how is Uniken’s solution different from using an SSL or IPSEC based VPN?

According to the company’s website, REL-ID PCC is based on the concept of App-to-App tunneling. VPN’s on the other hand are based on TCP/IP Tunneling technology. VPN’s are installed as virtual network adapters and need administrative rights on the client machine in order to install them. VPN’s do not come with in-built mutual authentication and encryption technologies, for that one has to additionally invest in 2-way SSL or IPSEC technologies, increasing the total cost and complexity of the solution. These solutions are not viable when it comes to roll-out to large number of users.

More information about the product is here and here.

The Economic Times reports:

The firm has filed three patents and expects to file 12 patents in next one year. “Uniken is disrupting the digital security space with this platform that provides military grade security with rich digital experience,” said Sandeep Singhal, managing director at Nexus.

So, in the last few days, we’ve made two additions to the list of Pune companies that have raised funding in recent times (and that is even without counting the 3rd round of funding for FirstCry, because that was already on the list.) Is any company missing from our list? Please let us know.